Femme Fatale

Brian DePalma has always been an unabashed copier. (“homage” in the film world). His favourite target is Hitchcock and the Hitchcockian psychological thriller (Dressed to Kill, Obsession, etc…) although De Palma has never limited his imitations to just Hitchcock. The gunfight sequence on the stairs in The Untouchables is immediately recognizable as being lifted right out of the Soviet masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin. In Femme Fatale, DePalma’s latest venture, he has moved on to imitating himself.

The opening set piece, an incredibly elaborate heist set at the 2001 Cannes film festival, in which Rebecca Romijn-Stamos seduces a model in a theatre washroom, is a direct homage to DePalma’s own Mission: Impossible film. Well, on to the film itself. It opens with Romijn-Stamos watching the classic film noir Double Indemnity, Romijn-Stamos’ face reflected over Barbara Stanwyck’s. The message is clear. Romijn-Stamos as Laure Ash is the femme fatale of this film. She is the updated version of Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Ava Gardner in The Killers, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, and so on.

The femme fatale in classic noir is someone who uses her sexuality to lure men in to their traps in order to accomplish whatever sinister goals she may have. The problem, or rather, one of the problems with Romijn-Stamos as a femme fatale, is that she can’t act. It is hard to imagine someone as conniving and cunning when their acting is so poor. DePalma seems to realise this and thus gives her very few lines which is unfortunate because her middle-European accent is the stuff of legends. Instead, DePalma just has her stand, walk, and lap-dance in front of the camera which makes the most of Romijn-Stamos talents.

The plot, after the heist, is well, incomprehensible. There’s a lot of doubling and mirroring of characters always a Hitchcock favourite, blackmail, murder, incredible coincidences, sex, kidnapping, Antonio Banderas, and a large number of homages. There is a fundamental problem with films that are this referential. That is, who is it for? The people who get the references don’t care. In fact, it gets so that every scene, you start to think of another movie that may have been lifted from. Is that wedding scene out of Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black? Is that underwater crucifixion scene from somewhere else? Searching for these answers, in theory could detract from the film.

Femme Fatale doesn’t seem like a film though, rather a loose grouping of scenes that don’t make any sense and styles that change. This is no updated noir and from what I can tell it’s a movie about Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’ legs. There have been many films made about less interesting subject matter. Somehow, despite of, or perhaps because of, its absurdities, the movie remains fun.